Kazakhstan in the News and Haver Data

Kazakhstan, strategic for its oil and natural gas reserves, has lately been in the news with the visit of President Nursultan Nazarbayev to the White House and, more recently, with the attractiveness of its high yielding investment grade bonds. Haver is building a data base for Kazakhstan based on country sources. These data can be found in the Haver Data Base EMERGECW. Data are also available in the IFS data base but, in some cases, the country sourced data have more detail and are more current. For example, currently, the country sourced data provides GDP on a seasonally unadjusted basis for the first and second quarters of 2006, while the IFS data base has data only through the fourth quarter of 2005.

Kazakhstan is a former Soviet Republic and is located in central Asia, bordering China, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. It is about the size of Western Europe and has a population of about 15 million people. Its 2005 GDP was approximately $56 billion, resulting in a per capita GDP of about $3,700.

Until the second quarter of this year, Kazakhstan's real GDP growth rivaled that of China. (See the first chart) In the second quarter, however, Kazakhstan reported a decline of 2.53% from the second quarter of 2005. This was the first year to year decline since the first half of 1999. Data on industrial production cast some light on the second quarter decline.Industrial production decelerated sharply in the first quarter and the increase in the second quarter over a year ago was still subdued. The year over year increase in the third quarter was 11.37%, a rise that suggests that growth in the third quarter GDP is likely to recover. The second chart shows the year to year change in real GDP on a quarterly basis and the year to year change in the quarterly average of industrial production. Inflation, as measured by the year to year increase in the consumer price index has trended up since early 2002 and reached a high of 9.03% in May of this year. It has subsequently declined and was 8.44% in September. The third chart shows the monthly rate of inflation.